


Steel

by roseandtiger



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Justice League, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas, Gen, M/M, someone is being difficult, we all know who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 19:55:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3423566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandtiger/pseuds/roseandtiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yeats, Bruce, Clark, and the feelings trapped in the middle.<br/>Or, I Came Upon a Writing Prompt and It Led Me To These Two</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steel

_"Too long a sacrifice  
Can make a stone of the heart”_

Yeats’s words. Clark’s handwriting.

Superman’s Christmas card this year is painted in the deep blues and stark whites of the arctic, with an abundance of glitter and a polar bear on the bottom right corner. The bear is tangled in coloured lights, drinking a warm cup of coffee. Clark’s taken a black marker over it and given it a cowl and cape. It seems to fit the message.

The words themselves betray nothing. Their meaning is self evident, in the same way the words Batman and Christmas are when used in the same sentence. That evidence is scattered around the Watchtower, on several cards and hastily penciled stick figures, where his face is shrivelled like a raisin, and his limbs are long and pointy, and there’s a sack full of stolen toys – the resident Grinch. No, no one would think to question Superman on his choice of words.

Clark often sends his own cards to the mansion for various occasions, addressed to Bruce and the family and signed in his legal name, but Bruce burns them after reading. Too much of a security risk; too many connecting threads left if anything were to happen. And Bruce rarely needs physical reminders, the vaults of his memory are built strong and enduring. But these mementos, from one superhero to another, he keeps. For one, they are safe enough here in orbit. And two, these ones, with never a direct reference to anything from their personal lives, usually no longer than two or three lines of borrowed words - these are the truest words Clark will ever write to him.

He knows that place in Clark from which these words originate. Bruce often knows more than Clark is allowed to become aware of. It is a necessary survival skill. His life depends on reading what lies in-between. And the truth lying there is this: Bruce is not blind to Clark’s feelings.

Oh, Clark does not project. Not in the way anyone else might. Clark too is a creature of great restraint. For him too, this is a necessity. And although Bruce may often say otherwise, he is fully aware that Clark can hide and camouflage and obscure just as well – perhaps even better for Clark does not need a mask or the dark to do so. Clark’s exposure is owed not to absence, but excess. This is in his nature.

Hope. Clark has hope, even if he does not know that he does. Clark can’t help but keep it alive. Perhaps this hope does not even need to be nurtured, perhaps it lives and grows on sunlight alone, like the cells that fuel its host. This too is in his nature. For although Clark has enough sense to never say anything, he does not have enough to stop himself from hoping. And so he returns to these feelings, like a child picking at the scabs, pushing and prodding the tenderness. Though his mind might have accepted the futility, as one accepts a mathematical equation, it is only an intellectual acceptance. His heart forgets in between one beat and the next.

But Batman’s does not falter. His memory is vast and it is enduring. Knowledge goes bone deep, born in the darkest recesses of his mind, it trickles down to the lowest base component of him pure and undiluted by hope. Bruce has made his heart _steel_.


End file.
